Good as Gone (27 page)

I’d been holding mine too.

Back in my bedroom, I changed out of church clothes, but instead of going downstairs, I crept into bed and pulled the covers over my head.

God sent Jesus as a man to teach us how to be men.

Who had God sent to teach me how to be a woman? Was it Charlie?

When I went back to Sunday school the next week, he was gone.

One of the church elders, a woman in her fifties, ran the Sunday school class. She told us that for personal reasons, Charlie had had to resign. It was unlikely he’d be able to return to the position, she said. They were already beginning the search for a new youth pastor, and in the meantime, fellowship would be suspended and Sunday school would be taught by members of the Christian Education committee.

“Can we say goodbye?” someone asked.

“I’ll get a card,” Candyce said. “We can all sign it.”

“That would be very nice,” the elder said. “Now, get out your Bibles and turn to First Corinthians, chapter thirteen.”

Even I knew that verse. It was printed on the church bulletins and embroidered on some of the tapestries in the halls. But this time, the words seemed to be pointed straight at me:
If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Charlie had said he would let me down. And he was right.

With Charlie gone, church got very boring, and I stopped sleeping over at Candyce’s house. At school, I went out for the track team and made it. I was not a good speed runner, but I could run distances, and I could propel myself into the air and sail over the hurdles with my legs in front of me. Looking around at the girls I’d be training with over the summer, all of us standing on the dusty track, our skinny legs sticking out of nylon shorts, I knew I didn’t need Candyce or church or Charlie anymore. In eighth grade, I would have friends, real girlfriends who would show me how to brush my hair, put on makeup, and talk to boys. The girls on the track team had sleepovers and away meets; they painted racing stripes and Nike swooshes on one another’s faces, finished each other’s sentences. They were a tribe. When I was in eighth grade, my life would finally begin.

A few months later, I got the chat invitation.

His name was John David. There was no picture, just an outline of a head with a question mark inside it. According to his Facebook page, he was sixteen, and he had zero friends on his profile.

I tried to think of all the people I knew who went to high school. My friend Angela had an older brother named John; I’d had a crush on him once. Or maybe John David was somebody I knew from school who was just lying about his age, or some mean girls playing a trick on me. Maybe I was going to get reeled in with some phony “secret admirer” plot, and then they would take screenshots and post them for the whole school to see. Something like that had happened to a girl I barely knew, Rebecca. There were other things that had happened to Rebecca too. I unfriended her on Facebook so I didn’t have to see them.

I refreshed the screen, half expecting to see the profile’s friends shoot up to the hundreds, so that I’d know he was fake, a bot, an empty outline. Nothing happened, except the question mark took a little longer to load the second time. He couldn’t contact me until I had accepted his offer, so I clicked on the question mark and a chat box popped up.

Hi. Who are you?
I typed. I always spelled out words and added punctuation and capitals, even in chats with friends. I was reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
and couldn’t stand how ugly most of my and my friends’ writing looked in comparison with those sentences from a girl our age.

The chat box was blank for a few minutes. Then it started blinking as the person on the other end typed. The other person was not into spelling things correctly or capitalizing.

i don’t want to give my real name

Do I know you?
I wrote back.

There was a long delay while he typed, long enough to make me think he was typing from a phone.

we had amazing conversations together

I started to type another question, and then the chat box blinked again:

soul of a seeker

A wave of heat went up my body, starting from my toes and rushing up to my face until it was burning.

I typed,
Charlie?
but stopped myself from pressing the Enter key just in time and deleted it.

julie? u there?
I let out my breath slowly and typed:
I think I know who you are. You gave me a ride home a few times.
That sounded like I could be talking to a sixteen-year-old. I wondered how old he really was.

yes

Where are you now? You left without saying goodbye.

i had my reasons. u dont know my side of things

Side? I frowned and typed again:
Where are you now?

i can’t see you right now or tell u where i am. i have reasons. u were always smarter than the others. wanted to get back in touch.

It’s nice to hear from you,
I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

There was another pause.

god is with u all the time. i can see HIM all around u like a halo

My scalp prickled and I could feel his eyes on me suddenly, almost like I’d felt them on our last car ride home together. I wondered how far away he was.

Why did you leave? You left without saying goodbye.

i promise ill tell u the whole story soon but please for now just talk to me. i’m lonely

I tried to picture him in front of a computer screen or hunched over a phone somewhere, but I couldn’t. I typed out the words
I miss you,
but then I backed the cursor up over them until they were gone and typed
Everyone misses you
instead.

He responded,
i miss u too,
just as if he could hear the real sentence in my head.
Something really important has happened to me since we talked. i’m going to tell u everything. god has a plan for me and for u too

This time he didn’t have to tell me not to tell my parents. He knew I wouldn’t, and I knew he knew, and although the word
God
sent the old thrill spiking through me, it was Charlie’s faith in me and the greatness of his need that caught the lightning-flash and amplified it, expanded it, made my entire body warm.

Go on,
I wrote.

I saw the face of god, julie. he wants something from me. From you too.

From me?
I could only retype the words.

from all of us,
he wrote, after a long time.

The Plan felt like a special project we were working on together, or a game. Whenever I was chatting with Charlie—or John David, as I began to think of him—I existed in another dimension. In the beginning, I guarded the screen—my desktop monitor was visible from the doorway, and I jumped every time the floorboards creaked in the hall outside. But then I began to feel comfortable existing in both worlds at once: the ordinary world, which consisted of me eating dinner and finishing my homework and going to track meets after school, and the world of the Plan.

In the ordinary world, I was Julie, maker of As, runner of hurdle races. My grades stayed high, and I didn’t drop my afterschool activities. That was part of the Plan: No dramatic behavior changes. I worked hard to keep my weight from dropping too, but the pounds seemed to be falling off no matter how much of my dad’s lasagna I ate. My mom blamed track and gave me extra helpings at every meal, but I knew it was the Plan working in me, preparing me for something John David called “privations to come.”

In the ordinary world, I was ordinary Julie, but in the Plan, I was radiant. He told me that my loveliness was like a bruise in the exact center of a blinding light, like a sunspot. The fire of God shone around me. Even though we never met in person, never video-chatted—too dangerous, he said—I knew he could see me. He said he saw me when he closed his eyes and prayed; he said he saw me standing in front of the sun with it shining all around me. And there were things he seemed to know about me that he could not possibly have gotten from the Internet. He knew, for instance, when I started shaving my legs. I had to, for track; even though my leg hair was barely there, just a glimmer in the sunlight, really, the other girls would have thought I was strange if I didn’t shave. He didn’t like the thought of me taking a blade to my legs. He told me that afterward, I wouldn’t need to do things like that. Things to appease the world.

I didn’t know if he was close enough to be literally watching me or whether he was finding out some other way. I didn’t want to know. Instead, I started pretending he could see me all the time so I could wear his gaze like a secret under my clothes, against my skin. It made Ordinary Julie a more exciting role, somehow. I performed my ordinariness for him: putting on lip gloss in the bathroom, giggling with other girls, reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
with my feet propped up on the ottoman, helping Mom with the dishes after supper, brushing my hair, writing in my diary—all for him. I even made up some diary entries that were totally ordinary, just listing what I did during the day, things Ordinary Julie did. I pretended to have a crush on this guy at school, Aaron. I felt sure Charlie knew how well I was performing my role, and I began to slip in little hints and references that only he would understand. I drew sheep on my binder and imagined him laughing at the joke. At the pep rally I got a sun painted on my cheek so he’d see it and understand the message. No matter how much I looked like a teenage girl to the others, he was out there somewhere, and as long as he was watching, I was divine.

The only time the two worlds touched each other was under the covers at night. Then I would try to whisper “Jesus,” and “John David” would come out instead. Once I dreamed I was falling, flying apart, breaking into a million pieces, becoming the darkness at the center of the light. I clenched my teeth and waited for it to be over. When I opened my eyes, there were red stars.

That’s when I realized I’d been in love with Charlie. A wave of shame rushed over me. It was stupid, the whole thing; a crush too embarrassing even to think about on someone who could never think of me that way, because I was a stupid little kid.

Or at least, that’s how it had been—then. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. The image of Charlie, faded now, seemed smaller than it had before. It had been months since I’d even seen his face. I did not have a schoolgirl crush any longer, because I wasn’t a schoolgirl; that was Ordinary Julie. I was divine.

In our chats, the outline of a head and shoulders in the profile window reminded me of a blue shadow cast on the sidewalk by someone you can’t see. The shadow was John David, and the everyday, ordinary Charlie who cast the shadow was no more important than the ordinary, everyday Julie. The embarrassing feelings were all for Charlie. John David was different. He was part of the light, surrounded by light. Not a shadow, but a real person standing directly in front of the sun, a person whose shape you can barely make out when you squint, hidden in blinding brightness. Tears came to my eyes, and there was a warmth in my chest, burning in my heart. I closed my eyes and saw the form of John David shining, haloed, a bruise in the center of brightness. He had already changed me. Walking toward him on the road made by his shining, I melted into him, and our darkness became pure light.

The Plan was an anti-plan, really. It was going to be a total surrender to God. That was all I knew. John David promised we would surrender ourselves to the source of the light together and sink into the sea of His love, and we’d never have to make a plan of any kind ever again.

One night I typed out the verse about the lilies of the field. He corrected me.

we won’t be lilies,
he wrote.
we’ll be nothing. we’ll be nothing at all.

On the last night before the Plan, Jane looked at me while we were brushing our teeth and said, “I know something about you.”

I was silent. I was counting to a hundred, like I always did when brushing. I could feel Jane’s eyes on me in the bathroom mirror but pretended I was alone so my face wouldn’t move.

“You think nobody notices,” Jane said, trying again. Foamy toothpaste dribbled out of her mouth and she spat it into the sink. “You think you’re so cool.”

I did not think I was cool. My parents thought I was cool. My friends thought I was cool, and some of them were even cool themselves. But I wasn’t. I only looked that way because of my friends, who were always calling me on the weekends to go to the mall, where somebody’s older sibling would drop us off so we could try on halter tops at Wet Seal and smell all the perfumes at Sephora. There were slumber parties at Kristian’s house with the whole team, and late-night chats with Lauren or Maya, some of which had begun to revolve around Aaron. I wondered if this was what Jane thought she knew. The made-up crush on Aaron had begun to take on such a life of its own that sometimes, in a moment of confusion, I thought it was real.

I refocused on the mirror and noticed that Jane was still staring, but this time her face was flushed and there were tears wobbling in her eyes. “How come you don’t like me anymore?”

I reached a hundred just as the subject changed. It was not a coincidence, I knew by now. Nothing was. I leaned over and carefully spat into the sink, then straightened up and rubbed my mouth with the towel. “Why do you think I don’t like you?” I asked.

“You could have just said ‘I do like you.’” Jane sniffed.

“I do like you!”

“No, you don’t,” Jane went on. By this time the tears were squeezing out of the corners of her eyes and tracking down her reddened cheeks. Jane cried all the time now. Mom said she was hitting puberty earlier than I had, and at least it was all going to be over sooner that way. In her old-man pajamas, as I called them, the button-down flannel top and drawstring bottoms hanging off her, Jane looked bigger than me, even if she wasn’t quite as tall yet. She didn’t have boobs either, but there was something about her that looked like the beginning of something. Mom said she might even be taller than me soon.